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Supplementary written evidence from Michael King, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

1. At the evidence hearing on 24 April 2019, the Committee discussed issues around the need to improve transparency and redress for school complaints. Under LGSCO’s current jurisdiction, we cannot consider complaints about the internal management of schools. This is particularly problematic in the area of children with special educational needs – while we are able to investigate complaints about council’s actions regarding SEN issues, we cannot look at complaints about a child’s progress or the help they are getting at school or any other issues which concern the actions of the school[1]. This significantly constrains our ability to provide a holistic consideration of the issues raised by a complaint.

2. It seemed that this situation would be resolved nine years ago. A pilot scheme introduced through the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 enabled parents and families from 14 local areas[2] with complaints about school matters who have been unable to resolve their concerns through resolution to seek redress through the ombudsman. Shortly after the pilot scheme commenced, a decision was made not to continue with the new service. However, the independent evaluation of the pilot commissioned by the Department for Education was overwhelmingly positive in its appraisal of the effectiveness of the pilot scheme in empowering schools to address complaints more rigorously and efficiently. Parents valued having an independent route of redress to resolve such complaints. Building on lessons from this pilot, we believe there is compelling evidence for the government to create a mechanism for redress in respect of concerns about school related matters across the board.

3. In the period between April 2010 to July 2012 (during which the pilot was underway but a decision had been taken not to continue), we received 481 complaints from the local areas taking part in the pilot. Caution must be taken in extrapolating these figures as they are highly unlikely to reflect true levels of demand given the limited time between the legislation which extended our jurisdiction and the start of the service and also constraints on any activity to promote awareness of the service. These factors would have impacted on the potential take-up of the service. If our jurisdiction was extended on a permanent basis to cover school-related complaints, we would expect to see a similar steady rise in the volume of complaints to that seen in other areas where our jurisdiction has been extended such as in relation to private social care provision.

4. Additional funding of just over £2 million was granted to LGSCO to assist in dealing with school complaints from the participating areas. We would be happy to work together with Government to undertake more detailed modelling of any cost implications of extending LGSCO’s powers in this area – at a high level, based on our experience we would expect the overall resources necessary for us to operate a jurisdiction across England to be much lower per complaint and likely to be within £4 million in total to cover school complaints across the whole of England. This would reflect recent changes we’ve made to our operating model across our entire jurisdiction, such as an early assessment function, which enable us to operate an ever more cost-effective service than when the pilot was carried out.

5. A further gap in redress in education arises from the fact that parents whose children attend a maintained school may bring complaints about school admissions or exclusions to LGSCO, but similar redress is not available to parents whose children attend an Academy. School admissions complaints have declined considerably as a proportion of our workload, which has coincided with the growth in Academies and Free Schools. Based on 2017-18 figures, there has been a 40% reduction in complaints we received in this area since 2013/14. This decline suggests a substantial number of parents and children have lost the right to independent resolution by the ombudsman if they have an unresolved complaint on admission issues if their school has been converted into an Academy over this period. We would be keen to work with Government to consider how our jurisdiction could be expanded to include investigating complaints about admissions and exclusion decisions by all schools, including academies. This would ensure there is alignment and equal access to redress for parents and children across the board.

May 2019